What I've Been Listening To: 5/5/12

Dead Memories, by Slipknot

Radioactive, by Imagine Dragons

Khyber Pass, by Ministry

33 Ghosts IV, by Nine Inch Nails

God is in the Radio, by Queens of the Stone Age

A Beginner's Guide to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Carl Jung

In 1921, brilliant Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung published a work he called Psychological Types, and in this work he undertook the monumental task of characterizing all the various aspects of personality found in different people. It was by no means the first attempt to categorize people's personalities--even the Ancient Greeks had developed the idea of different temperaments--but it was certainly one of the deepest dives into the mind of the individual that the world had ever seen.

Jung's work was certainly superb, but it focused almost entirely on internal cognitive processes. Without the connection to any sort of concrete action, Jung's ideas were neglected outside of academic circles--until 1962, that is. At this point, a woman named Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, began elaborating on Jung's ideas and attempted to connect them to observable behaviors with the goal of finding a way to identify ideal candidates for different types of jobs. In doing so, they created what is now called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. They somewhat deviated from Jung's work, but mostly stayed faithful to his basic precepts.

MBTI is now the most popular personality assessment in the world, and even in casual circles one can frequently find plenty of conversations concerning each person's MBTI "type". Many--including myself--have found it to be an extraordinarily useful tool for understanding themselves and others, and I'd hate for anyone to miss out on this opportunity of self-exploration because they didn't understand any of the jargon thrown around by the MBTI community. So, with the background now out of the way, I'd like to explain a little bit about how MBTI works, starting from scratch.

MBTI attempts to describe people based on four different elements of their personality. The first element of personality is that of introversion and extroversion. This element describes where people get their energy from--an introvert gains their energy from focusing inwardly, while an extrovert gains their energy from focusing outwardly. Extroverts are drained by being alone and require stimulation to keep going, while too much external stimulation typically drains introverts very quickly and they must withdraw from the outside world--socializing, activity, etc.--to regain their energy. In MBTI, extroverts are designated by the letter E while introverts are designated by the letter I.

The second element of personality in MBTI is that of sensation and intuition. Jung and MBTI use these words much, much differently from the layman, so caution must be used when using this terminology. Sensation and intuition are known as the perceiving functions due to the fact that they deal with how people gather information. Someone who prefers sensation is called a sensor and they prefer information that is concrete and tangible. They are not necessarily more limited to their five senses; it's just they prefer to focus on what is rather than what could be. People who prefer intuition, on the other hand, are called intuitives and they prefer to gather information abstractly and to "connect the dots" between different insights and ideas. Sensors are designated by the letter S and intuitives are designated by the letter N.

The third element of personality is that of thinking and feeling. Once again, the definitions used in this context are not the same as those commonly used. Thinking and feeling are called the judging functions because they deal with how people make decisions based on the information taken in by sensation and intuition. Thinkers prefer impersonal analysis of information. They are not as concerned with how they or others will feel about a certain decision and typically dislike injecting anyone's personal values into a situation. Feelers prefer personal evaluation of information--they are not comfortable making a decision without considering harmony, empathy, and ideals. They make decisions by assigning value, as opposed to the raw cause-and-effect kind of decision-making that comes naturally to thinkers. Thinkers are designated by the letter T and feelers are designated by the letter F.

The fourth and final element of MBTI is judging and perceiving. This aspect of personality describes whether one prefers to express and draw upon their judging (T or F) outwardly or their perceiving (S or N) outwardly. A judger prefers to show the world their thinking or feeling function while keeping their perceptions internal, and a perceiver prefers to show the world their sensing or intuition function while keeping their judgements internal. There are some behaviors that are loosely correlated with judging and perceiving--for instance, judgers are often stereotyped as being more organized and uptight while perceivers are often stereotyped as being lazier and more laid-back--but the key aspect of judging vs. perceiving is how S, N, T, and F are expressed. There are certainly many rigorous, punctual perceivers and many disorganized, scattered judgers. Judgers are designated by the letter J and perceivers are designated by the letter P.

To find your MBTI type, take the four designated letters for each element and line them up in order--for me, it's ISTP, for Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiver. There are 16 distinct MBTI types:

                  Intuitives          Sensors

                    ENFJ               ESFJ

Feelers         INFJ              ISFJ

                    ENFP               ESFP

                    INFP               ISFP

                   ENTJ                ESTJ

Thinkers     INTJ               ISTJ

                   ENTP                 ESTP

                   INTP                ISTP

Each of the 16 types has its strengths and weaknesses, and learning about your MTBI type can help you maximize your strengths and work on your weaknesses. If you want to find your type, there's a self-assessment test here that I've found to be very high-quality. However, I recommend against simply letting a test tell you what type you are. Instead, read about MBTI and all of the different types and consider how you really act and think. Good descriptions of each of the MTBI types can be found here and here. 

There's an enormous amount of information about Myers-Briggs I'd like to write about here, but the rest will have to wait for other posts. I hope you enjoy learning about personality types as much as I have for the last several months.

What I've Been Listening To: 4/22/12

The Good Soldier, by Nine Inch Nails

 
 Thunders, by Steele Croswhite

  Thunders

 Vanishing Light, by In Flames

 

 Night of the Hunter, by 30 Seconds to Mars

 

 Endseekers, by Oh, Sleeper

 

Irrational People, Rational Actions

Ludwig von Mises

     As economics is the study of how people interact and exchange with each other, one may easily sink an otherwise consistent and logical theory of economics by finding fault in how it describes human behavior. Even positivists, with their statistical models and broad-brush approach to social behavior, must bring forward arguments as to why they believe their system has the clearest connection to concrete reality--the aforementioned human interactions and exchanges--and not merely reality as an abstraction. If a scientist with no previous experience studying gas were for some reason unable to repeat any experiments with a gas under controlled conditions, he would be unable to make any sense of his data due to the multitude of uncontrolled variables influencing the factors he was attempting to isolate. His only recourse would be to fall back on his understanding of how individual molecules and atoms behave and use it to create principles of how they act in aggregate. Likewise, one studying human behavior has no way to conduct experiments with human behavior under controlled conditions. Even the act of attempting to control conditions, such as in a psychological experiment taking place in a laboratory, subtly changes the behavior of the subjects involved, and the larger the number of participants involved in the study, the less control the researcher has over the variables that influence what he or she is studying.

     So the only possible way to really determine if an economic theory is sound is to see if it matches what is known about individual behavior. With this in mind, consider the so-called Austrian school of economics, founded almost entirely on assumptions made about individual behavior. The Austrian school is so heavily focused on this aspect of economics that Ludwig von Mises, who is perhaps the central figure of Austrian economics, wrote his work Human Action entirely focused on the economic implications of taking a rational, detailed look at how and why people take certain actions. Because of this focus the Austrian school is of course a frequent target for criticism regarding its assertions about human behavior. One of the most common criticisms launched against the Austrians, and Mises in particular, is that they assume that each individual will make economically sound choices.

     This claim is not unfounded, but it is incorrect. The misunderstanding results from Mises' own statement in Human Action: "Human action is necessarily always rational." How can this possibly be true when so many people regularly make choices that blatantly harm them? Isn't a man who steals a car and is subsequently killed in a shootout with police acting in an extremely irrational manner? Only if one approaches rationality from a limited point of view.

     In order to determine whether or not human action is rational, one must shift from a viewpoint that is static to one that is dynamic. At any given moment, a conscious human being always has at least one goal of some sort--it may be as great as to build a company or start a revolution, or it may be as small as to relieve an itch. Because of the limitations of the mind, the priority assigned to each goal must necessarily shift from moment to moment. How the priority is assigned is of no consequence. The point is that while there are definite trends to what each person values, different values take precedence at different times.

     Next, what is the best way to determine what someone values? It cannot simply be what a person thinks they value--even if she is completely honest with herself, many of her goals and values are rooted deep in the subconscious and therefore her conscious assessment of her goals and values will be at best incomplete and at worst utterly incorrect. Perhaps it is found in what a person says they value? This cannot be the case either, as even if he is being honest with others the problems surrounding his consciousness and subconscious still exist, and there is also the possibility that he is lying about what he values. This leaves us with only one possibility: that how a person acts is the best indicator of what they value. Mises defines action as such: "Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life." Therefore action can cover a broad range of activities--for example, someone whose goal is to learn more about computers may act by taking a class or reading an article, while someone whose goal is to discover secrets of life may act by sitting in quiet contemplation or prayer. Both individuals are acting.

     Now consider the car thief from a few paragraphs ago. He may have had many, many goals during his lifetime. Perhaps he wanted to graduate from college or recover from a drug addiction at some point, but due to the dynamic nature of goals, they may not necessarily be the goals on his mind at a given moment. But using the principles stated in the previous paragraph, one can look at his actions to find out what his goal is. At the moment he steals the car, one can plainly see that his goal at that specific moment was to obtain that car. That goal may have been the result of some other goal--a desire to impress someone, perhaps, or simply a desire for transportation when he had no money.

     Let's say it's possible to trace his goal back to impressing a girl with a nice car. His reasoning was certainly flawed, as it failed to take into account the possibility that he wouldn't be around to impress her anymore if he got caught or that the girl didn't care about fancy cars and simply wanted an honest companion. However, given his goal and his reasoning (albeit faulty), his action of stealing the car was indeed rational. Therefore when we say that someone was "not acting rationally", we are in fact saying that either a) his reasoning was irrational, or b) his goal was irrational. Mises clarifies this when he states:

When applied to the means chosen for the attainment of ends, the terms rational and irrational imply a judgment about the expediency and adequacy of the procedure employed. The critic approves or disapproves of the method from the point of view of whether or not it is best suited to attain the end in question. It is a fact that human reason is not infallible and that man very often errs in selecting and applying means. An action unsuited to the end sought falls short of expectation. It is contrary to purpose, but it is rational, i.e., the outcome of a reasonable—although faulty—deliberation and an attempt—although an ineffectual attempt—to attain a definite goal. The doctors who a hundred years ago employed certain methods for the treatment of cancer which our contemporary doctors reject were—from the point of view of present-day pathology—badly instructed and therefore inefficient. But they did not act irrationally; they did their best. It is probable that in a hundred years more doctors will have more efficient methods at hand for the treatment of this disease. They will be more efficient but not more rational than our physicians.

     So if human beings always act rationally, what does this mean for the study of economics? Some would draw the conclusion that if human beings always act rationally, then they must always act economically, and choose to criticize Austrian economics on that basis. But this basis is totally contradictory to what Mises has already implicitly stated and explicitly states elsewhere in Human Action. In chapter 2 he writes:

It was a fundamental mistake of the Historical School of Wirtschaftliche Staatswissenschaften in Germany and of Institutionalism in America to interpret economics as the characterization of the behavior of an ideal type, the homo oeconomicus. According to this doctrine traditional or orthodox economics does not deal with the behavior of man as he really is and acts, but with a fictitious or hypothetical image. It pictures a being driven exclusively by “economic” motives, i.e., solely by the intention of making the greatest possible material or monetary profit. Such a being does not have and never did have a counterpart in reality; it is a phantom of a spurious armchair philosophy. No man is exclusively motivated by the desire to become as rich as possible; many are not at all influenced by this mean craving. It is vain to refer to such an illusory homunculus in dealing with life and history.

     The wide variety of motives that drive human beings means that one can act in a manner that is perfectly rational yet harms him economically. Even if a man ostensibly values economic success above all else, economic success in itself is meaningless and needs some other foundation--in the same sense that the stolen car in the earlier example was not a goal in itself but was in essence a "sub-goal" of a deeper motivation. Someone who on the surface may highly value wealth in actuality may value social status, challenge, or security and use economic success as the avenue for fulfilling those values.

     So, if Austrian economics correctly describes the rationality of human action and the role of economic motivation in the broader scope of what people value, it is insulated from the common criticism that it doesn't accurately model individual action. Quite the contrary, it is the only system this author is aware of that does. The positivists make the faulty assumption that aggregate human action can be quantified and controlled like a scientific experiment, the classical economists only focused on the actions of one group of people--the producers (as described elsewhere by Mises), and the Marxists essentially denied the possibility of individual action or motivation and instead ascribed it all to collectivist "class consciousness". These other schools of economic thought may indeed arrive at some correct conclusions, but if their basic methodology is incorrect or incomplete, they are no more than a broken clock--right twice a day, and otherwise completely off-base. If one wishes to analyze what really goes on in the economy, they must have a methodology that also reflects reality, or their efforts will only result in nonsensical theory divorced from reality.